With rapid development of an Internet Protocol (IP) network, a capacity and the number of users of an IP bearer network are increasing constantly and rapidly, thereby imposing an increasingly high network bandwidth requirement. In order to meet the increasingly high network bandwidth requirement, a cluster technology is generated. By using the cluster technology, multiple network devices may be externally presented as only one network device. A cluster may be used to perform a forwarding service.
In the prior art, after receiving a packet, a network device in a cluster can determine, by searching for a forwarding table, an outbound interface used to forward the packet. The cluster occupies more software and hardware resources.